If you have tons of photos on your iPhone that you need to put on your Mac, here’s how to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac.
There are several ways to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac; some of these may be more suitable for you than others. Apple has made it easy for users to do this with the new Photos app released with the OS X Yosemite 10.10.
With iCloud Photo Library, you can sync your iPhone and Mac, so when you take a photo on your iPhone, it will automatically appear on your Mac without any extra effort. Sure, many users have encountered syncing issues with Photos, but hopefully Apple will fix them soon, and there are temporary fixes that you can try yourself.
However, you don’t have to use the new Photos app to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac, as there are a few other options available to you.
Here’s how to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac.
Using OS X Photos
Again, with the new Photos app, you can have your iPhone photos automatically transferred to your Mac using iCloud Photo Library; this becomes perhaps the easiest option if you like automation.
The big thing here is that you’ll want to make sure iCloud Photo Library is enabled. Here’s a handy guide on how to set it up, but essentially you’ll go into Settings, scroll down and tap on it, and then tap the toggle switch so it turns green (if not already). You’ll also want to go to Preferences in the Photos app on your Mac and enable iCloud Photo Library there as well.
From there, every time you take a photo on your iPhone, it will automatically appear in the Photos app on your Mac. You can then drag and drop photos from the Photos app to any folder on your Mac.
Using Dropbox
If you are a devout user of Dropbox, you may enjoy taking advantage of its photo upload feature.
You can enable this feature in Dropbox settings on your Mac as well as your iPhone. When you enable it on both devices, the photos you take on your iPhone are automatically uploaded to your Dropbox account the next time you open the Dropbox app on your iPhone (you can also keep the app open in the background).
From here, you can access your Dropbox from your Mac and the photos are automatically placed in the Camera Upload folder, and then you can move the photos to another folder on your Mac.
It’s a really easy solution to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac, especially if you use Dropbox frequently. However, it’s important to keep in mind that these first two options are not the best for videos, as the larger file size can take forever to sync with your Mac.
Using Image Capture
If you’re not a big fan of the new Photos Mac app or Dropbox, perhaps the easiest way to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac is to use a built-in OS X utility called Image Capture.
Image Capture is extremely easy to use. All you have to do is plug your iPhone into your Mac, launch Image Capture, select your iPhone from the sidebar, then click the bottom right corner. You can also select specific photos and then hit Import to import only the selected photos to your Mac.
It’s the best option for videos as you don’t have to rely on the cloud to sync these large file sizes across devices. You can import them and they will be imported instantly in a few seconds depending on how long the video is.